


nomenclature

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, F/M, Fall Maiko Week 2020, Probably A Lot Of Historical Inaccuracy, Soviet Union, The Great Purge of 1936-1938, but like the darkest version imaginable, look: don't think about it too hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27249127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: On a cool, moonlit night in the summer of 1937, Mai plays both sides.
Relationships: Azula & Mai & Ty Lee, Mai/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	nomenclature

It takes longer than expected to find the right signal. There’s only one radio in the thirteen-to-fifteen girls’ bunkhouse, and it’s ancient—it’s been sulking in the corner of the common room for at least as many summers as Mai has—and so she and Azula have to calibrate it, kneeling down and turning the dials this way and then the other, until they finally come across the right frequency.

They cut in halfway through the _Internationale._ It’s tinny but clear, the opening to every soccer game and school assembly and Young Pioneers’ Conference they’ve ever been to. _All power to the workers, and away with all the parasites._ Ty Lee taps her foot reflexively. “That’s really good sound quality, Azula!”

Azula doesn’t even acknowledge her.

The trial begins at eight-thirty.

The beginning is always the same: the names of the accused, the list of charges. Conspiracy, sabotage, anti-Soviet sentiment, the subversion of the will of the masses. This time the voice is reedy, almost hesitant, and on a normal night she would have said something about this to Azula—something about how you would think by now that everyone on the military tribunals would remember what to say.

Tonight she says nothing, and draws her knees up to her chest. Ty Lee perches on the windowsill, one heel swinging rhythmically against the wall. Beneath her, Azula occupies the entirety of the room’s single couch, with her feet up and her red Young Pioneers handkerchief folded beneath her hands and her face set in a look of such careless, casual interest that it feels very consciously like a performance. Azula, playing herself.

(Mai doesn’t imagine that Azula would appreciate this analogy. It wasn’t Azula who used to underline sentences in Mai’s school-issued copy of _The Cherry Orchard._ )

“Stop doing that, Ty Lee,” says Azula, loud enough to carry. “I’m trying to hear.”

Ty Lee’s foot stills. Several heads turn in their direction. On a normal night—a night like this, with no bonfire or evening lecture—they might be listening to the contraband records some of the Leningrad girls brought from home. Tonight, everyone sits around in clusters of two or three and pretends to listen and watches them. Watches Azula.

It takes a long time to get through the written confession. Mai barely listens to the words—she catches _treason_ and _Zinoviev_ and _plots against the life of Comrade Stalin_. It sounds just like every other confession. For some reason, this surprises her.

Eventually, however, the questioning starts. Mai sits with her back against the wall, and listens to the prosecutor read off the first question.

“Do you confirm the testimony you gave at the preliminary investigation?”

The voice that answers is so _recognizable_ , even cloaked in static, that it catches her off-guard. It’s a voice that she’s heard through walls and at kitchen tables, rich with elocution lessons taken before the revolution. It’s the voice that used to remind her to leave her shoes next to the radiator every time she came to Government House.

“I confirm my testimony fully and entirely.”

She’s standing up suddenly. Azula’s stares upward, unmoved by her mother’s admission. Ty Lee’s eyes are wide with a question only Mai can read.

The trial proceeds around them— _let us begin the interrogation._ Everyone has stopped looking at Azula to look at her.

“I’m going to bed,” says Mai. “I’m tired.”

At this Azula finally glances up. She half-turns to look over the armrest, and arches one eyebrow. “It’s too early to be _tired_ , Mai.”

“Well, I am.” For a moment, she thinks that Azula is going to object further—to insist that she stay for at least another half-hour—but Azula immediately turns away and settles back into her position of studied repose.

“Fine,” she says. “Just be quiet, will you?”

Mai doesn’t have to be told.

The hallway is silent, and for a moment she actually considers going to bed. She imagines the room she shares with Ty Lee, dark and quiet, the moonlight gleaming off the medals lining the wall next to the door: Ty Lee’s for gymnastics, hers for marksmanship. She could throw her pocketknife at the ceiling over and over, or read her book of Mayakovsky poems, or smoke one of the cigarettes Ty Lee stole from her sister’s purse and hid under her mattress at the beginning of the summer. This would be the correct thing to do. The safe thing.

 _Her mother’s nails digging into her shoulder, reminding her to be careful. Headlights outside their building at midnight all this past winter, booted foosteps on the stairs—not for them. Never for them. Her father staying out late with Azula’s father, drinking, telling war stories, and then coming home and sitting down with her mother at the kitchen table to write down which jokes landed and which didn’t. Be_ careful. _Never tell anyone what we talk about at home. We have come a long way, all of us. You all need to stick together now: you and Ty Lee and Azula and_ —

The grass is damp beneath her feet when she steps out onto the lawn.

She closes the door behind her, quietly but quickly, so that it won’t creak. Last summer, she and Azula and Ty Lee used to sneak out this way after lights-out and steal down through the trees to the beach, to talk about nothing and float on their backs beneath the stars. There has been no night swimming this year.

Her destination now is across the stretch of empty grass where they hold morning assembly. The common-room window is illuminated behind her, and she thinks that if Ty Lee looks outside she’ll see something moving across the yard, and know. Mai trusts Ty Lee, possibly more than she trusts anyone else. Still, she keeps close to the building for as long as she’s able to, and tries to stay in the shadows.

It’s a beautiful night. This seems unfair somehow. The sky is cloudless, the air smells like birch sap and salt, the Black Sea laps endlessly at the shore a few hundred yards away. This is—Mai has been told this repeatedly—a very prestigious camp. You have to do something impressive to come here for the summer, or else have a very well-connected father.

As she gets closer, she hears loud laughter streaming out of the boys’ building. No one here is enforcing the solemnity of the occasion. Every window on the ground floor is open, except one.

Mai hesitates for a moment. Then she knocks.

“It’s just me,” she says, sliding the window open. She half-expects him to jump. She’s startled him before, even though he was the one who showed her how to get in.

Zuko is lying on the bed, his hands clasped uselessly in front of him, his eyes red-rimmed. Like Azula, he’s staring at the ceiling. Next to him, a transistor radio—more contraband, another thing smuggled in and carefully guarded—is playing a familiar voice at a low volume.

He turns his head only slightly as she clambers into the room. “Mai.”

She closes the window behind her. The room is stuffy—cut off from circulation—and the regulation lantern next to him is the only source of light. “Why are you listening to this?”

“I can’t _not_ listen to it,” he says, almost harshly. She stands at the edge of the bed, and now he really looks at her. “Does Azula know you’re here?”

“I told her I was going to bed.”

“And she believed you?”

“Maybe.” She sits down, carefully. “She’s busy, Zuko.”

He almost laughs at that. “What? _She’s_ listening?”

(Mai remembers Azula coming into school last January, stamping the snow off her boots, her cheeks flushed with anger or with cold. Her voice, a low hiss as she shoved her notebooks into her desk: “Ursa had better _watch out_.”)

“If she didn’t put it on, then someone else would.” Mai is sure that somewhere in this building people are sitting around yet another radio, talking in whispers, speculating. It isn’t the first time it’s happened this summer.

He doesn’t say anything else, but he doesn’t tell her to leave, either, and so she pulls her legs up onto the bed and settles herself against the headboard.

“And what was your association with the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov?” asks the radio.

The answer, when it comes, is long and very detailed.

“That’s a lie,” says Zuko. “That’s not—”

“I know.”

“I _know_ it’s a lie. I was with her when that happened—it was a Saturday. We heard it on the radio. She cried, Mai. She _knew_ him.”

“I know.”

He stares up at her with something approaching desperation. “There’s been a mistake,” he says. “I’ll—I’ll make a petition. I’ll go to Comrade Stalin myself, it I have to, and—”

“ _No.”_

Her hand is on his shoulder before she can think about it. All of a sudden she can hear the pounding of her heart. She’s felt a lot of things tonight, but this is the first time she’s felt _afraid._

“You can’t,” she tells him. He blinks, anguish momentarily replaced by shock. Her other hand slides up to the side of his face, and she isn’t _thinking._ “You know you can’t.”

She feels his hand at her waist, pulling her down to lie next to him. She lets him. His jaw is still set, defiant. There are tears glistening in his eyes once again.

“What can I do?” he asks.

“Nothing.” She says it too quickly. She can tell how inadequate it is, even as she knows it’s true. “You can’t do anything. _We_ can’t do anything.”

He’s still looking at the ceiling, even as his arm tightens around her. “I can’t do nothing. I can’t just go home and,”—his expression darkens—“My father. He did this.”

Mai has nothing to say to this. She knows that he could very well be right.

She wishes that she were someone else, someone like Azula or Ty Lee—someone who knew how to use words to persuade and caress and soothe, someone who had anything to offer him other than cold, consequential truths. She wishes that she could convey to him how devastated she would be if something happened to him.

“There was a mistake,” she says, trying to sound confident and controlled. “They’ll send her somewhere safe, and eventually they’ll realize it. And then they’ll bring her back.”

His eyes close for a second. She can tell that he doesn’t believe it any more than she does.

She wishes that she could say to him: _promise me you won’t do anything dangerous_. She wishes that she could compel him somehow. But she knows Zuko, has known him her entire life, and she knows that he has never been completely won over to the idea doing the correct, advisable, safe thing—she sometimes thinks she wouldn’t like him so much if he was. And she has no incentive to offer him. She would be asking him to stay—and for what? (For _her_?)

She becomes aware of him looking at her. She tilts her chin up to meet his gaze.

“Hey,” he says. His hand shifts against the small of her back, pulling her into a more comfortable position. “Thank you. For coming tonight.” He isn’t quite smiling, but his voice is softer.

“Always,” she says. Like an admission. Around them, the trial is still going on.

She can feel him breathe in. “There’s sentencing tomorrow. At noon.” Doubt crosses his face as soon as he says it—concern, she thinks, that he’s asking too much of her.

“I’ll be there,” she says. “Up the hill, in the forest. I’ll skip archery.”

Ty Lee will cover for her, she thinks. She’ll have to. This is what they do: they cover for each other.

“Good,” he says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. She presses her head against his shoulder, and they stay there, not talking, until the opening notes of the national anthem ring out once more.

**Author's Note:**

> So! This one requires some explaining.
> 
> I've long been interested in the concept of a modern-ish AU for the Fire Teens that preserves the core dynamic of "childhood friends who grow up in an atmosphere of intrigue, danger, and power." You might argue that China would be a more culturally appropriate setting here than the Soviet Union, and you would be right, but I know way less about the early PRC than I do about the USSR, and I figured that making A:tLA characters Soviet is about as accurate as making them American. That being said, I am by no means an expert on this period, and I would like to apologize for any inaccuracies about the exact ages of characters relative to events in the series, the overall structure and vibe of elite Soviet youth camps, and the conduct of show trials during the Great Purge of 1936-38. Also, some of the lines from Ursa's trial are lifted from [this transcript](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/1.htm) of the interrogation of Nikolai Bukharin in March 1938: not because I imagine the situations to be analagous, but because this was the most complete English transcript of a trial from this period I could find.
> 
> If you would like to discuss this fic, A:tLA in general, or Stalinist youth culture, you can find me [on tumblr](https://fire-flakes.tumblr.com/)


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